Coleraine, United Kingdom

Coleraine: Submarine Cable Landing Point

Coleraine is a town in County Londonderry, Northern Ireland, situated near the mouth of the River Bann on the north coast of the United Kingdom. Its coastal position makes it a landing point for transatlantic submarine cable infrastructure, connecting the United Kingdom to destinations across the North Atlantic. One submarine cable lands at Coleraine, linking the town to an intercontinental corridor that spans from North America to the British Isles and Ireland.

The single cable landing here, EXA North and South, places Coleraine within a transatlantic network that connects the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, and the United States. While Coleraine hosts only one cable, that cable's reach across the North Atlantic gives this landing point a significance that extends well beyond its local geography, embedding Northern Ireland's north coast into a wider international submarine cable route established in the early 2000s.

Cables Landing at Coleraine

EXA North and South is a submarine cable system with a total length of 12,200 kilometres, which entered service in 2001. The cable connects four countries: the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, and the United States. Its transatlantic span makes it one of the longer cable systems to touch the United Kingdom's coastline, and its landing at Coleraine anchors Northern Ireland directly into a North Atlantic route that reaches the eastern seaboard of North America on one end and the island of Ireland on the other.

Regional Context

Within the United Kingdom's submarine cable network — which comprises 66 cables across 125 landing points — Coleraine is a single-cable landing point, placing it in the top 88 percent of UK landing points by cable count. Compared to more densely served UK locations such as Bude (8 cables), Lowestoft (6 cables), and Blackpool (4 cables), Coleraine hosts a more focused connection, though the transatlantic reach of its single cable distinguishes it from many lower-volume peers. It represents one of the northernmost landing points on the island of Great Britain and Ireland serving a long-haul intercontinental route.

Network Role

Coleraine functions as a single-cable terminus rather than a multi-cable hub, with its entire submarine connectivity concentrated in the EXA North and South system. That system enables a direct transatlantic corridor linking Northern Ireland to both Ireland and North America — specifically Canada and the United States — via a cable first put into service in 2001. This makes Coleraine one of the few Northern Irish points of entry into the transatlantic submarine cable graph.

In the broader regional submarine cable picture, Coleraine's role is narrowly but precisely defined: it is the landing point through which the EXA North and South cable makes contact with the UK's north coast, forming a discrete node on an intercontinental route that otherwise touches landmasses separated by thousands of kilometres of ocean. Its presence in the network illustrates how transatlantic cable routes do not concentrate exclusively in southern English landing points but extend to the northern reaches of the United Kingdom as well.